


we speak in tongues of searing iron

by kingslayer (amurgin)



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Character Study, Happy Ending, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-09
Updated: 2019-10-09
Packaged: 2020-11-29 14:16:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20965778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amurgin/pseuds/kingslayer
Summary: When Dimitri draws his tongue, he draws it just as he would his own blade, and when the words come gushing out, they are red and boiling hot. They are streaming down his flesh, slipping between the cracks in his fingers, pagan rivers, sin and profanity wound tight around his jaw.





	we speak in tongues of searing iron

✘

He hadn't meant to.

But more often than not, Felix does his talking with a sword, does his touching with its blade because iron on skin speaks loud, speaks clear. There’s no mistaking pain because pain is undeniable, everlasting. The universal language that cannot go lost in translation as it traverses the narrow passage from tongue to ear.

Then, there is the matter of body language, but that, too, is steeped in too much politics. _ Body politics. _ Mind and bones fighting for meaning where there is little to be found. 

He does not use his hands. They aren't worth trusting.

Dimitri, too, has other ways of speaking. 

His language is crimson, vermilion beneath a more brilliant light, and it stings when he talks. War horns wailing in the dead of night, church bells ringing, thrumming against Felix's skull. White noise. His voice cuts like the serrated edge of a knife gutting Felix, opening him up from pelvis to throat and making a mess of his insides. He searches for meaning written on the underbelly of carnage and chaos. 

When Dimitri draws his tongue, he draws it just as he would his own blade, and when the words come gushing out, they are red and boiling hot. They are streaming down his flesh, slipping between the cracks in his fingers, pagan rivers, sin and profanity wound tight around his jaw. The rusted remains of a muzzle strapped to his mouth, one that he busted open so long ago. Almost five years ago. 

A rabid dog, a boar, a beast. 

He speaks animal and Felix trembles. 

✘✘

When he slips his weapon out of its sheath and plunges it into Dimitri’s shoulder, it is already too late for him to haven’t meant it. 

The message is clear. To whom? He is not sure, but Dimitri seems to understand.

His body does not so much as stir from the spot where he stands erect, towering over Felix, crooked like Babel, and he does not speak, save for the glint in his eye that's slowly coming back to life. The sword cuts clear through his muscle, comes out the back and sticks so far out that its hilt presses into the skin of his chest. He doesn’t move. Blood trickles down from the point of the sword. 

What's striking about Dimitri is that he bleeds himself as easily as he bleeds others. He moves his hands, grasps with the very tips of his fingers, and someone always breaks. One way or another. Though it isn’t always the other person. 

Come to think of it, maybe it’s both predator and prey, Dimitri and whoever else it is he’s breaking. Maybe he breaks himself first, uses shards of his own bones to carve life out of another, and then they’re both broken by the end. 

Dimitri. Felix, _too_. Neither is spared.

Below where he stands, Felix trembles. 

His chest heaves out and in, breath heavy like lead in his lungs, and he gasps for air as if he were the one impaled on Dimitri’s spear. He breathes, but the oxygen doesn’t reach him. There is the stammer of a heartbeat that sounds to him irregular when the blood rushes to his head and his ears are inundated by the shouting of his struggling heart. 

But he is not afraid. Despite the quivering of his shoulders, the way his toes curl in his boots, the way his spine straightens up a little more, grows a little harsher, Dimitri doesn’t terrify him. 

He infuriates him. Felix is burning mad, hand flaring loose then tight around the handle of the sword. Killing him for good is an option. Letting him live is also a possibility, though it sometimes feels less so. 

Dimitri opens his mouth slightly, and he says something, but no voice comes out. Instead, he’s inhaling, the corners of his lips tugging upward until it appears to Felix that he is drawing the flames into his own lungs. 

His hand comes up to rest upon Felix’s cheek, and it is endlessly warm in its touch. Nothing like the hands of a man that’s spent five years breaking necks, five years dyeing the ground beneath his feet red, screaming, shouting bloody murder, voice running hoarse and coarse until all that remained was silence. 

Silence is a language, too. 

Felix speaks it. 

✘✘✘

There was something Felix had meant to say, but stabbing the renegade king wasn’t it. 

And yet, the ease with which the sword slips into Dimitri’s shoulder, unhindered by any resistance, as if it belongs there, says as much about him as it does about Felix. Dimitri _hadn’t_ stopped him. Felix _ had _ meant it. 

In his own way, this was an answer. The only answer he could ever hope to give. 

Because Dimitri had asked him something, before the white fur of his cloak ran red with blood, before Felix’s sword sunk into his flesh. Now, he couldn’t recall his words.

Even so, his answer is received in the form of Dimitri’s hand, mild against his skin. Another smaller gesture of intimacy to contrast Felix’s. Being stabbed entails a certain intimacy of its own, even if it looks a little differently. 

But Dimitri’s kindness does not lay to waste everything about him that is anything except kind. It makes it all the more painful to see humanity in such a monster, and the sight shakes Felix up with anger. The world is an altogether too cruel a place. 

He pulls back, falters a step behind, more than anything because it is no intentional movement on his part, legs being driven by something ancient that aches in his bones and sets them into motion. Wrath. 

His arm follows, and the blade comes with it, yanked out of Dimitri with as little effort as he used to put it there in the first place. There is still blood on its edge, blood that now begins to drench the wet ground drop by drop. And he stands there, sword clenched tightly between his fingers. The handle burns, and it sears a brand into the skin of his hand. The mark of the beast for the man that takes a stab at regicide. 

Still, that is not his heaviest sin to bear. 

Felix’s cross is not being able to stop the man he loved from becoming his greatest enemy. More than the Empire. More than the world. 

✘✘✘✘

_ “Do you think—”, _ and he pauses for an instant where his shoulders slump down and Areadbhar lowers its head, kneels before Felix with the loyalty it does not bear its master, _ “Do you think yourself able to love me again?” _

_ “Does your idiocy know no bounds, boar prince?” _Felix spits and the tip of his sword hits the ground, burying itself into the soft ground like a gravemarker. An even exchange. This is no place for weapons. 

Except it is, because they are fighting a war, a war against the world. A war against each other. Felix and Dimitri march together, but their allegiance is not to the battle. 

_ “I suppose not.” _The sound of Dimitri’s laughter, perhaps the only thing still clear about him, rattles something within Felix, something that gets set into motion only by the sound of his voice. It starts making a racket, begging to be let out. His blood boils. 

It’s the cemetery inside of his heart, that somber part of him where he’s buried the relics of the past with dried-blood fingertips, knees sunk into the mud, digging himself raw. Now here comes Dimitri, unearthing junk that does not belong to him. Felix’s heart, amongst other things. 

The wind descends upon them in a shrill whistle, shattering the sharp silence that had engulfed them, nipping at their skin viciously. Winter is well on its way. 

_ “I never stopped loving you.” _

_ “Even now?” _There is an unmistakable surprise that pries Dimitri’s eye open. Perhaps his other one shudders beneath the eyepatch he wears. What’s left of it anyway. And his brows pull together at the bridge of his nose. He watches Felix with an expression that reads fear, doubt and regret pulling at his features. 

_ “Even now. You were just too busy to open your eyes, back when you still had two of them.” _

_ “You might be right about that. But, Felix”, _ and his lips lift into a smile, the corner of his eye following behind, _ “I saw you. Always. You were never not by my side.” _

_ “You’re wrong.” _ Felix’s body stiffens, his hands turn into fists on either side of him, and his voice shakes when his shoulders drop. He looks away, unable to take Dimitri head on. There is too much pain in one man. _ “I lost you. For five years you were lost to me. More than ever before.” _

_ “No, Felix.” _ Dimitri is by his side at once, as if he had never been anywhere else. His hand comes up to Felix’s face, curling inwards, his index finger propped beneath the apple of his cheek. The touch is but a brush, really, but it is impossible to deny the warmth of his skin. Even beneath his gloves, beneath his armour, Dimitri is alive. Safe and alive. _ “It was then that you were by my side the most. Your ghost, keeping me company in the darkest of times.” _

_ “How dare you. Was it my ghost that loved you, then? Did it please you? Going off, jerking your pathetic little heart to my memory?” _ He slaps at his hand, pulls away, grabs the handle of his sword and presses forward. _ “I was there for you before everything else and you never once had eyes for me.” _

He hadn’t meant to. Not really. Not like that, anyway. 

But Felix always did his best talking with a sword. Now was no different. 

In the heat of the moment, Dimitri’s words, his pitiful little attempt to apologize burns at the back of Felix’s skull. It swallows his mind in a cloud of steam, anger coursing through his body, and he sinks his sword into Dimitri’s shoulder. Clean. Straight-through. As if there was nothing there to begin with. 

Dimitri stays his ground, his determination admirable, if nothing else. And he bleeds like a man, red and hot, from the place where Felix grounds his blade. Where he executes their bloody history. The past and all its shackles. That same hand, Dimitri’s, comes to finish what it started, landing upon his cheek, holding him steady through the realization that sinks into him like the fangs of winter tearing him to shreds. 

He retreats in search for cover, taking the blade along in an impasse of thought. Yet, Dimitri shadows him, returning to his side where he belongs. 

_ “I will no longer run away, Felix. Only to you. Only if you’ll have me.” _As big as he is, his voice is but a sliver of sound, drowned out in a battlefield of death cries. But there is no more need for talking. All has been said. 

Dimitri leans down, back arching forward until he is upon Felix, mouth against mouth. Their lips take on each other’s shapes, fitting against one another so seamlessly that no breath goes wasted between the two. The exchange, or lack of, casts Felix’s face, his ears, his neck into a deep shade of red, rivaled only by the blood that still trickles down from the slit that opens Dimitri up, at long last, to Felix’s hands. He brings them up to knot in the overgrown strands at the back of his neck, sword dropping to the ground uselessly, and he pulls himself up onto the tips of his toes, closer, kissing him in one breath for five, ten, almost twenty years worth of stray glances, meek gazes, and feather touches. 

All of it for this one moment spent together. 

Dimitri, too, lowers his hands to Felix’s hips, lifts him up a little closer than he can reach. His lance joins Felix’s sword on the ground, and then they are left alone. 

It is a desperate kiss, clamoring for life, for a way out of the hole Dimitri’s dug the both of them into. Fingers tug, pull, grasp at clothes with a suffocating urgency, as if the world is ending before them and this is their last chance. That is what it feels like, within the moment. But then they pull away for air and it’s the beginning of a new world, the end of a chapter as they dive back in a second time. Again. _ Again. _

When they put an end to it for good, Felix is the one to speak first, his voice hazy, vague and heated. His breath is spent.

_ "You touch and kiss like a man would, but I know better." _He lays in hiding, face buried inside Dimitri's neck. _"I know you best." _

And Dimitri can’t help but smile, pulling him out and pressing their foreheads together, nuzzling his face into his. 

They’ll have to get him patched up right away, but a different, more urgent wound is healed at long last, cauterized by Felix’s blade, his anger.

The end of one era is only the beginning of another. 

**Author's Note:**

> Felix Hugo Fraldarius I love you and want only what's best for you and Dimitri.


End file.
